Italy unveils plan to calm fears of escalating debt crisis |
| Washington Post - Aug 5, 2011 |
Seeking to calm fears of an escalating debt crisis in Europe, Italy’s embattled Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi unexpectedly unveiled a plan for widespread economic reform Friday that would speed up painful austerity measures and move the world’s seventh-largest economy toward adoption of a balanced-budget amendment.
The sweeping plan, which came just 48 hours after Berlusconi had dismissed the need to do more, came as pressure intensified on European leaders to stem the slide of massively indebted Italy into the same kind of fiscal crises that have swept over the smaller economies of Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Berlusconi’s announcement appeared to pave the way for the European Central Bank to engage in a buying spree of Italian bonds in an attempt to bring its borrowing costs down from unsustainably high levels.
Berlusconi’s move came after European heads of state interrupted their summer vacations, scrambling for a consensus in a flurry of phone calls. But it remained unclear whether the package would be enough to ease the panic over Europe’s debt crisis that, along with fears of a slowdown in the United States, erased $2.5 trillion off global stock markets this week. European markets closed lower Friday after another volatile session.
Read Full Article from Washington Post
- Posted: 2011-08-05 22:56:59
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